MSTW Team Rosters 4.4

MSTW Team Rosters 4.4 will be released soon. It contains three new features:

  • The new

    No team specified in shortcode.

    shortcode (display shown below).
  • Added a new “long format” player position (shown in the shortcode display below)
  • Worked on improved responsiveness of this page, and re-worked the player profile/bio page display to greatly improve its responsiveness.
This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Team-Rosters-2-2-1024x506.png

The man page for the shortcode is available here.

A quick introduction to the

No team specified in shortcode.

shortcode:

Team Rosters 2 (fancy display)

California Golden Bears Roster (College Format)

[mstw-tr-roster-2 team='cal-bears' roster_type='college' sort_order = 'numeric' ]

Support for MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards

“It is what it is.”

The MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards plugin will continue to be maintained on the wordpress.org plugin site in support of new and legacy users. However there is no plan to add new features in the near future.

It will still be available on the WordPress.org site, and the documentation will be available on the shoalsummitsolutions.com site. It will work with future versions of WordPress into the future. Bugs will definitely be addressed. However at this time no enhancements to the plugin are planned.

New users should consider the MSTW League Manager plugin, which is actively maintained and enhanced with new features. Legacy users of Schedules & Scoreboards may also want consider migration to League Manager for improved features and support.

While the name “League Manager” might sound like overkill for smaller, simple, one-team or one-school sites, it really isn’t. While League Manager provides more features and advanced features for larger, regional sites, it can also be used just like Schedules & Scoreboards for simpler sites without the need for advanced features. Feel free to contact me about the options here.

MSTW League Manager & LM Add-ons Version 2.10

Version 2.10 of MSTW League Manager and League Manager Add-ons has been released.

What’s New

The primary new functionality is improved handling of Overtime Games when Standings are being auto-calculated using MTW League Manager Add-ons. In fact, until this version, there was no way to indicate that a game ended in overtime so the auto-fill of standings could process it correctly.

Several new videos are available on League Manager, including how to handle overtime games with and without the MSTW League Manager plugin. Visit shoalsummitsolutions.com to view them.

Other than that, you can read about the minor changes in the Change Logs in the readme files or on the website – MSTW League Manager Change Log or MSTW League Manager Add-ons Change Log.

MSTW League Manager & Add-ons 2.6 Released

Versions 2.6 of both the MSTW League Manager and the MSTW League Manager Add-ons plugins have been released. There are three main enhancements:

  • Added support for BYEs (or open dates). BYE games can now be created in Add Games and Manage Games screens, and then displayed in the shortcodes. This will support a much improved display of brackets with an “odd number of teams” in next release of MSTW Bracket Builder. Read more here.
  • Added the option to link game time/result to a media URL in the Settings screen, schedules tab. If there is a media link for a game, the link will be added and a media icon will be displayed in the time/result field AND YouTube links will be automatically embedded in the single game page content. Read more here.
  • Added a new multi-team schedule shortcodeEither a teams, team, or league argument must be passed to the mstw_multi_team_schedule shortcode., which behaves much like the multi-league standings and schedules shortcodes.

A number of minor bug fixes and JavaScript upgrades are also included.

There were no major upgrades to the MSTW League Manager Add-ons, it was simply updated to support the changes in MSTW League Manager, for example, support for BYEs in its plugins.

MSTW League Manager update should come up on your admin Dashboard -> Plugins. If you have purchased the add-ons, you should be able to access the update using the same link you received originally. If not, just let me know.

MSTW League Manager 2.0


Happy New Year! Just in time for 2018, MSTW League Manager 2.0 is available on wordpress.org.

Why the numbering jump from 1.4 to 2.0? The entire plugin was restructured to support the automatic, on-the-fly updates of league standings from the league’s game results. With the introduction of the MSTW League Manager Add-ons, team records no longer need to be created and maintained. Instead records are computed from the standings shortcode is rendered. Of course the plugin can still be configured and used exactly as before for sites that do not maintain game schedules.

In addition, version 2.0 also includes these new and improved features:

  • The standings are now sorted based on a primary sort rule and two tie-breakers, which are selected on the Settings screen. AND they actually work!!
  • Games can be identified as conference and division, in addition to non-league. Conference and division win percentages and points (calculated from the existing fields in the team records) can be displayed in the standings tables.
  • New display options for front end displays have been added, some on the Settings screen and some via shortcode arguments.
  • League sliders and tickers can now display media icons and links to media sources when a media link has been provided for a game. Media labels and links can be entered on the Update Games screen, avoiding the need to edit the games one-by-one on the Manage Games screen.
  • Game (league schedules) can now be added in bulk via CSV file imports.
  • Added /lang directory containing a .POT file has been added for translators. (If you create a translation, send me the .po file and I’ll add it to the next release for you.)
  • Fixed several bugs including sorting venues by venue group on the Venues screen.
  • Changed URLs to Protocol Relative URLs to prevent some problems with https based sites.

Team Rosters Version 4.1 Released

Cal Roster Table

Team Rosters version 4.1 has been released**. Improvements include:

  • Added new admin screen to add players to rosters “in bulk” (paginated, 20 at a time). This screen allows players to be added to a roster MUCH faster than via the Manage Players screen, which is one player at at time. But the quickest way to create a roster is via the Import CSV screen.
  • Added a new admin screen to edit players on a team “in bulk” (20 at a time). Note that on this screen, and the Add Players screen, you cannot modify the player description or the player photo. Use the Manage Players screen to change those fields.
  • Added the capability to link the teams in Team Rosters to teams in the MSTW League Manager plugin, in addition to the MSTW Schedules & Scoreboards plugin. Team logos can be pulled from the selected database. (Team Colors are available only in S&S currently, but that will be addressed in the next League Manager release.)
  • Added a Quick Start admin screen and context sensitive help to all admin screens.
  • Finally squashed the dastardly bug that ‘broke’ Featured Images (thumbnails) for posts in SOME THEMES. (I believe. Please let me know if you see this behavior again.)
  • Corrected a bug that prevented “sort roster by number” from working in certain circumstances, and a bug that prevented the CSV Import screen from using the team selected in the “Select Team to Import” control. (Thanks to those of you who have brought bugs to my attention.)

The plugin remains “translation ready”, but translation has been moved to WordPress’s new “PolyGlots” system, and the /lang/ directory has been removed from the plugin distribution. (I am happy to help translators. Send me an e-mail.)

The CSV import sample files have been moved to ShoalSummitSolutions.com, and the /csv-examples/ directory has been removed from the plugin distribution.

**NOTE: There was a problem with the initial upload of the plugin to wordpress.org. If you auto-installed the plugin from your admin screen prior to reading this, you MAY have encountered some errors. If so, simply de-activate and delete the plugin, then re-install. (You will not lose your data.) Sorry for any inconvenience.

MLB Logo Set Just Released!

MLB Logo
Chicago Cubs MLB Logo
Cleveland Indians MLB Logo
San Francisco Giants MLB Logo

Just in time for Spring Training, a complete set of Major League Baseball Logos, is now available. Have an MLB site? Or maybe just a little league that uses MLB logos?

Over 100 images are included in the .zip file. These .png images are precisely scaled for the best appearance in the MSTW plugin displays on your site.

Special offer to all MSTW Newsletter subscribers. Use this code – OPENINGDAY – to receive 50% off your purchase until Opening Day 2017!

Get your copy now!

NOTE: Your purchase is for the labor expended to convert the images to the optimal sizes for use in the MSTW plugins – at least one 41x28px and one 125x125px image for each team. NO RIGHTS TO USE THESE IMAGES ON YOUR SITE ARE GRANTED OR IMPLIED. You must obtain the rights necessary to use each image on your site, which depends on your site (personal, commercial), and the organization owning the rights to the image.

MSTW Tournament Bracket Builder Premium Version 1.0 Released

The MSTW Tournament Bracket Builder Premium is the leading WordPress plugin for creating and managing tournament brackets. Nothing else comes close! Simply and easily build tournament brackets (knockout rounds) and game schedules (fixture tables). The automated admin process lightens your workload, and the simple shortcodes will make your site pop. See how easy it is in this short video!

Tournament Bracket Builder - Fixtures Table ThumbnailTournament Bracket Builder - Knockout Bracket Thumbnail

{Click on images to view entire screenshot}

Your purchase includes one year of free upgrades, and access to a full users manual, video tutorials, and a dedicated community support forum.

MSTW Tournament Bracket Builder features include:

  • Create single or double elimination brackets of 4, 8 or 16 teams.
  • Customize front-end displays using a large set of display options, and with custom CSS styling.
  • Link to a custom database of teams and game locations. Add team logos, customize display of team and venue names, links to team sites, links to Google maps, links to venue websites, and more. (This database can be shared with the MSTW League Manager plugin now, and with the entire MSTW family of plugins soon.)
  • Schedule the 1st round by established seedings or with user-defined game pairings.
  • Automatically handle of “BYEs” (free pass to next round).
  • Advance winners – winner is advanced to next round when game goes final (as well as first-time losers for double elimination brackets).
  • Specify and display home teams (very important for some sports, or just identify who is wearing white).
  • Plus much more!!

Did we mention your purchase includes one year of free upgrades, and access to a full users manual, video tutorials, and a dedicated community support forum?

BUY NOW AND SAVE 50%! Simply enter the code GOLDSAVE50 on checkout. Offer good until the start of the NCAA March Madness (3/14/17). Hurry and grab the best WordPress Tournament Bracket Builder for half price!

League Manager 1.4 Released

League Manager version 1.4 has been released. Here’s a summary of the major enhancements in version 1.4:

  • Multi-Standings Shortcode. This shortcode supports the display of multiple league standings tables via a dropdown list of selected leagues at the top of the standings table.
  • Multi Standings

  • Last & Next Game Columns. The next game and/or the last game for each team can now be displayed in league schedule tables.
  • Schedule Ticker Shortcode. Tickers are intended for the top of home pages as quick views of recent games. The range of dates can be controlled by the date arguments described below.
  • League Ticker

  • Schedule Slider Shortcode. Sliders are larger views of league schedules with more information than tickers. The range of dates can be controlled by the date arguments described below.
  • League Slider

  • New Date & Time Controls. Schedule shortcode displays can be controlled by several arguments for game date ranges including: start date (“now” continually changes the date & time), a fixed end date, a number of days into the future, or an interval (days) around the start date.

A number of smaller upgrades and bug fixes are also in this build.

Several tutorials on the new features will be available soon for Gold Support Members.

Team Logos Now On Sale

You can now purchase logo sets for your favorite leagues at the the MSTW Store. Countless hours have been invested in building logo sets for testing the MSTW plugins. Why re-invent the wheel? Whether you don’t have the graphics skills, don’t have the interest, or just don’t have the time, you can jump start your website’s database of teams with pre-sized logos for MSTW schedule tables, standings tables, and scoreboards (41×28 px) or player profiles, team galleries, single game pages, and schedule sliders (125x125px).

All NFL, Pac-12, and Big-10 teams are available now. More NCAA Leagues, MLB, NBA, NHL, the Premier League, Euro-16 team flags, Olympic team flags, and more will be available in the near future. If there are team logos you need soon, feel free to contact me.

Pac-12 Schedule

Sample Scoreboard

Premier League Standings

Cal Schedule Slider

49ers Slider

More examples are available on the MSTW Development Site.

NOTE:
You are purchasing only the labor expended to convert the images to the optimal sizes for the MSTW plugins. At least one 41x28px and one 125x125px image. NO RIGHTS TO USE THESE IMAGES ON YOUR SITE ARE GRANTED OR IMPLIED. You must obtain the rights necessary to use each image on your site, which depends on your site (personal, commercial), and the organization owning the rights to the image.

MSTW Bracket Builder 1.0

MSTW Bracket Builder version 1.0 is now available on wordpress.org. Check it out in action on the MSTW Dev site. The MSTW Bracket Builder plugin is intended as a complement to the MSTW League Manager plugin. While League Manager supports the creation and display of “group play” for tournaments or round robin tournaments, Bracket Builder supports the creation and display of “knockout rounds” or tournament brackets.

test-tourney-bracket

Define and configure tournaments, add the games, and use the shortcodes to display either “brackets” (aka “knockout rounds”) or “game tables” (aka “fixture tables”). Both front-end displays and their contents can be customized with CSS, and a (growing) set of shortcode arguments to reflect your site’s “brand”.

euro-16-bracket

The plugin is now available, as is a library of man pages on this site. Video tutorials will be available for Gold Support members … hopefully soon. (Send in specific topics you’d like to see!)

euro-2016-fixtures

So what’s next? Several extensions to the base League Manager and Bracket Builder plugins are planned:

  • League Scheduler that will automatically create single and double round robin schedules, and assign venues to the games based on venue availability. View this as a running start; a schedule editor will be available to tweek schedules as necessary.
  • Bracket Builder will support more tournament formats – double elimination, consolation games – and automatically update bracket displays based on reported final scores of games.
  • Bracket Builder will be integrated with League Manager, so for example, tournament brackets can be automatically built for a league based on the league standings (seeding), and the front end displays can offer more information without duplicative data entry.
  • League Live Scoring will allow fans at games to update game status in real-time. League scoreboards will display status updates without the need to be refreshed.

When? I don’t know, but as you can see, progress is being made. If you have a favorite on this list, let me know!

League Manager Versions 1.2 & 1.3

League Manager versions 1.2 & 1.3 were released in the past few days to address two bugs in the previous version(s).

Version 1.2 fixes the bug which prevented game times from displaying properly in the shortcode displays (times were rounded to hours and minutes where zero’ed).

If you have changed some some settings for a sport, but NOT the schedule table time format, you will need to change the schedule table time format to any other setting, save it, then reset it to what you want.

Version 1.3 fixes a bug that most users may never encounter. If a team was removed from a league (via the Teams admin screen), it continued to be displayed in that league’s standings table (shortcode). It would not appear in the Update Records admin screen for that league. In fact, the team could even be deleted, and its record would still appear in the standings table!! Please don’t ask. 🙂

However, the correction sometimes causes the [mstw_league_standings] shortcode to display a message for existing leagues (with perfectly good records) similar to the following:

No records found in league pac-12-south.

Fortunately, this problem is easily fixed. Just update the existing records for the league in question; that is, load them in the Update Records admin screen, and re-save them without change. This video demonstrates the problem, and shows you how to make the simple fix.

New MSTW Video Tutorials

A growing library of video tutorials is now available to our Gold Support community. Here is the first video in a series on styling Game Schedules.

(If you are receiving this post via e-mail, you may have to access the video from the post on the site’s front page.) The concepts presented in this video are applicable to other plugins as well.

The next tutorial in the series is an in-depth demonstration of styling the game schedules via the plugin’s stylesheet. It is available to Gold Support members.

Your comments and suggestions on video tutorials are always welcome.

Game Schedules Plugin Upgrade

The Game Schedules plugin upgrade is nearing completion, which means it’s feature complete but there’s some testing to finish. Please take a look at the progress on the dev site pages and let me know what you think.

  • The new shortcode, [mstw_gs_slider], is working and is pretty cool if I do say so myself! The settings from the admin Color Settings page are working. There are MANY combinations of settings and shortcode args to test. So I’ll probably take “the Microsoft testing approach*” to the features that I don’t use on my sites. Custom CSS by team/schedule seems pretty solid.
  • Added the ability to display the next N (remaining) games in a schedule to the [shortcode] and the widget (by setting the first date-time to ‘now’).
  • Added the ability to display multiple teams/schedules in the same schedule table or slider via [shortcode] or the table widget.
  • Adding the ability to customize the look of the schedule table [shortcode], the schedule slider [shortcode], and the countdown timer [shortcode] (in test).
  • Added the ability to show/hide data fields and customize data field labels so they can be re-purposed. The Admin screens now display the customized data field labels in place of the defaults. (Cool!)
  • Added the ability to filter the All Games admin table by schedule id.
  • Added an option to link a game location/venue to a map or another (venue or team) website.
  • Completing the internationalization of admin screens.
  • Added a javascript datepicker control which simplifies game date entry.
  • Added a javascript colorpicker control to admin screens to simplify color entry.
  • Added the ability to specify custom formats for dates and times (based on php date() format strings).

A lot of this is back end stuff. If you would like to try out a beta copy of this release, just send me a request via email.

Besides cleaning-up/finishing/testing all of the above items, I have started developing a new “Teams” concept which will be an integral part of the overall MSTW Framework and tie all the existing plugins together. Turns out, this ‘first step’ has forced some significant modifications that will ripple through all the plugins over time. But it’s all good.

Thanks to all of you who sent in recommended enhancements. Some of them actually made the cut. 🙂

* Let the users find the bugs in version 1.0. 🙂

Welcome to the MSTW Development Site

This is the development and test site for My Sports Team Website (mstw) plugins and the lab for other “experiments”. As such, you my on occasion see some strange goings on (up to and including crashes). The primary elements of the configuration are listed below.

Plugin Shoppers

Feel free to look around. Write me if you have questions.

Plugin Users

If you think your plugin is not working, you may want to sample what’s here. Feel free to play with the functionality, inspect the styles with your favorite tools, and view the HTML source. If you’d like me to change a setting on the Admin Dashboard, just write. PLEASE POST ALL SIGNIFICANT QUESTIONS ON THE WORDPRESS FORUMS rather than sending e-mail to me directly. This will allow all users to benefit from your questions and comments and from my responses. You decide what should be personnel or ‘back-channel’ and what would benefit the larger community. You can find the forums on the plugin links below.

Site Configuration

I try to keep the configuration current because this is where I test new versions of the plugins and their compatibility with new versions of WordPress. However the stylesheets and plugin settings are in continual flux in response to questions from users.

The very latest versions of the plugins, often versions that have not been released, are always on the site (because this is where they are developed and tested). If you want to access the very latest development version, you can follow the links below to the WordPress.org pages, then follow the developers link to the SVN repository. The Development Version is the very latest and greatest. (Just don’t ask for support on it!!)